Evolutionary vs Intelligent Design in Product

Evolution is a “dumb”, undirected process. Its 3 main components are:

• Random mutations
• Testing for fitness
• Replication

Intelligent design, in contrast, revolves around building things strategically and with purpose.

Your team wants intelligent design. It’s human nature.

But what usually happens (even though leaders might not want to admit it), is a hybrid of the two. You do an evolutionary approach for a while. It’s not quite random, but you’re taking educated guesses on what will work.

Eventually, you start seeing patterns of what’s working and what’s not.

Then, in a brief moment of inspiration, the path forwards become clear. The right play is obvious. It feels “easy” (though obviously there’s often a lot of hard work and challenges ahead). That’s the moment of intelligent design.

From there, you optimize and exploit that strategy to its local maximum.

And then the cycle repeats.